The next time we visited, Guga, who was one of the owners, had totally transformed it into a quirky, yet totally welcoming art installation that happened to serve delicious French fare. One day in 2005, a friend invited us to a kind of pre-opening restaurant party in a spacious 19th-century second-floor apartment on Gudiashvili Square, where Old Town becomes Sololaki. “Harmony and coziness will never go out of fashion.” In a few years, Kala’s owners would add the KGB bar and Pastorali restaurant, both designed by Guga, to their Erekle II domain. The cafe fertilized the vacant neighborhood with refreshing alternatives to the city’s limited restaurant scene. Rounded off with an international and Georgian menu and a solid jazz house band, there was no cooler place in Tbilisi. The interior of Kala was stripped down to bare brick and warmed with a motif of Georgian rugs and kilims and Guga’s trademark use of found objects and antiques. Back then, there was nothing else on the street. We had found our watering hole – even better than having Anna point one out.Īpollo had been designed by local artist Guga Kotetishvili, a name we wouldn’t know until 2004, when he helped two young Apollo regulars auspiciously launch an entrepreneurial gastro-dominion with the opening of Cafe Kala on Erekle II Street, a narrow, 100-meter lane in Old Town. Behind the high wooden counter was a somber, dark-haired young woman who served semi-cold Argo beer for 3 lari a bottle and a simple lunch for a few lari more. A greasy boombox played jazz, blues and classic rock cassettes. There was a large table made from a huge buzzsaw blade, covered in Russian and Western photo magazines. It was an airy single room with white walls decorated in a relaxed collage of photographs by Richard Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Weston and other known and anonymous photographers. One day we stumbled into a bar, Apollo Cafe, across the street from the opera house. They just hang out in each other’s homes.”
Surely, there has to be a bar or cafe where the local Bohemians go to pose. In 2001, new to Tbilisi, we asked our friend Anna where the hip went to sip.
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